Ross Barnes, Response One You Asked Search engine marketing is a much cheaper alternative to direct mail, email, and telemarketing. Everyone seems to be shifting budget that way, but is search a viable standalone?

by Ross Barnes

Media messages delivered across an ever-growing number of channels, from email to SMS to Tweets, surround consumers throughout the day. These have an undeniable impact, but the difficulty lies in combining these media in the unpredictable pattern that will lead consumers to make a purchase. It is the integration of all these media which has seen marketers busy spreading their advertising efforts across a variety of different channels.

Response One recently commissioned research aimed at discovering the effectiveness of different media at driving Web visits, and poinpointed the top four channels for driving consumers to a Web site:

1. Customer e-mail
2. TV and newspaper advertising
3. Direct mail
4. Search engine links

To look more closely at the role of online and Web site searches, Response One asked UK consumers whether they were able to satisfy the majority of their pre-sales queries online and found an unsettlingly even split: 49 percent of consumers were satisfied by the information they found on the company Web site; 51 percent were not. It is likely that a significant portion of the unanswered questions relate to campaign-specific information and could be satisfied if search were suitably integrated with the campaigns running at the time.

The way consumers interact with brands--claiming the information they want at the moment, reviewing, criticizing, and sharing experiences with other users across the globe--has developed at breakneck speed. Marketers are still trying to understand how to harness this constantly evolving touchpoint. How and when people access the Internet is an area that still requires exploration. Research earlier this year revealed that 70 percent of Britons go online while watching TV and 27 percent search the products advertised in commercials. These findings tell us that consumers can be driven onto a search engine by other media. The customer journey may involve more than one or two steps, so why has search not yet gained its proper status as an advertising medium at the planning stage?

The experience consumers have of a brand is holistic in that it is composed of experiences ranging from across channels. Nevertheless, advertisers and marketers still cling to an outdated and wasteful approach towards communications that is best defined as a “silo” approach. Sometimes a few elements of the campaign are integrated, such as email and direct mail, or follow-up direct mail on display advertising, but most organisations are happy to stand back and let each channel run its campaign independently of the other. The result of this behavior is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to track response and efficiently measure return on investment (ROI).

Search in particular is a victim to this mentality, as it is practically never taken into consideration at the media planning stage of a campaign. This is probably due to its lack of an established role in combination with other media. Generally speaking, when a cookie is put onto a landing page--informing the system that a potential customer has landed on a company Web site via a specific search engine--search engine marketing is then regarded as accountable for that acquisition. It is, of course, evident that the effect a television commercial has on footfall, for example, is much less measurable than other factors such as competitor campaigns. As a result, traditional media is concerned that a significant portion of the sales conversions derived from the single campaign will be attributed only to the last trackable medium, which is often search.

Integration of search at the early planning stage can instead prove that this is a revelatory medium that helps attribute uplift rather than polarize results. If keyword searches increase after television advertising is launched, sales conversions due to that advertising can be realistically measured. The same can be done with the subsequent rise in campaign-specific word searches after an item of direct mail or a promotional email is issued. Search can in fact prove invaluable in revealing which channels had the greatest impact and helping inform future broadcast channels, times, and dates.

Although search is already commonly optimised for the company e-commerce site and traffic is driven to it both organically and through sponsored search, this effort is rarely made for single high investment campaigns. Far too often, companies do not even extend the key terms they bid on to include those used in their campaign-specific advertising. Surfers cannot find what they were looking for and response analysis results skewed as it fails to register the impact of other channels.

Ross Barnes is Head of Digital Media at Response One .